The hydrocarbon recovery industry has embraced multilateral wellbores to enhance volumetric and qualitative recovery of specified hydrocarbons while minimizing earth surface impact. Multilateral wellbores, simply put, are those where a primary borehole is drilled from the earth""s surface and at least one xe2x80x9clateralxe2x80x9d borehole diverges from that primary wellbore somewhere underground. As a practical matter, there are more than one lateral borehole extending from a primary borehole.
Multilateral wellbores employ junctions to mate a primary wellbore to its lateral boreholes. Whether the bores be cased or uncased, generally the junction is larger in outside dimension than the primary wellbore through which it must pass to arrive at the site of lateral exit. One way to deal with this issue is to form the junction at the surface and then deform the legs and primary sections thereof so it has a temporary outside dimension smaller than the I.D. of the primary wellbore through which it will be delivered to its installation site. Once at its installation site, the junction is swaged back to near its original shape. Unfortunately, swaging can be damaging to the material of the junction and is effort intensive.
A multilateral junction comprises a primary leg and one or more lateral legs. Each end of the primary leg and each lateral leg has an inflatable element therein.
A method for installing a multilateral junction includes running a deformed junction to depth and serially or collectively inflating an inflatable element in each leg of said junction to reform said junction.